Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday September 07, 2007 @10:23PM
from the yet-another-success-story dept.

While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"

Having lived in silicon valley for several years now, it is not news when a company tosses out Windows boxes and replaces them with Linux boxes as an alternative to buying more Windows licenses (for upgrades or for expanding their collection of systems).

Business as usual is when companies adopt Linux for practical business reasons. It happens all the time in the valley, probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.

probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.

And growing.

It isn't the IT technical types holding up Linux deployment. It is the CIO that likes lobster with MS sales and the people who know nothing of OSes including MS. Maybe a little to do with "bundling". Thought that was illegal, but OK for M$. The last thing I/T wants to do change and learn. Like when the PCs came in, I/T was the last to adopt. When Linux comes in, I/T will

It's easier for guys with MBAs to trust others who also have MBAs rather than dirty hippies from engineering schools.But when it all boils down to it, a good CIO will switch to any technology if he can be convinced that it saves him money, time and improves reliability (and therefor the perception that he is doing a good job).

As long as he doesn't have to give up the machine on his desktop that took him 5 years to figure out how to open up a spreadsheet. (you can train any animal to do almost any trivial ta

Did you think about all those extra costs like 'client-licenses' or whatever they now are called? Did you think about that Exchange server license? Did you think about all those other applications that you have to buy extra?With a basic gnu/linux system you can get mailserver/fileserver/webserver/development software all for free, if the knowledge to maintain it internally.. If not the support-contracts for those systems are not that big.. And if you are running gnu/linux on the servers in a company it will

Is not Virtual Server a software you run on top of windows? So then you still have to buy a windows license for that, and if you are going to be running virtual machines you probably want a few more cpu's in the box.. Don't that cost extra too?VMWare ESX is a standalone OS that gives you almost the full performance of the actual hardware without having a underlying OS doing all sorts of stuff that will slow down the virtual-machines..

And IMHO all disk-management in windows is crap... If you want to take tha

$0.30 / day for Windows Server licensing? Huh, that's weird, because I could have sworn that quad-processor SQL server I just implemented the other day cost $105,000 to license for Windows Server Enterprise and SQL Server Enterprise (per processor licensing). Even spread over 5 years that's $58 / day, and $96 / day over your three year lifetime. We have a few of those boxes, plus all the application servers and other support servers. Yeah that's pretty cheap, anybody should be able to afford that...

Yea I guess Cisco is a phony made-up company.A computer costs $300, and the license for the OS is like $200. Plus licenses for Exchange and the file servers, domain controllers, etc you need to support all those desktops. Plus the software and add-ons for Windows cost money while the equivalent ones for linux/bsd/solaris are free.

Some companies do a cost analysis, and occasionally find out it's cheaper to run Linux for their specific situation. Shooting from the hip and saying it's always cheaper or that it

It would seem that Mindbridge is being run by the fanboys and not the accountants or shareholders.

Let's not bother to actually QUANTIFY "bunches of money" or do any kind of cost/benefits analysis and just make a headline out of it to get some free publicity.

Obviously nobody has done any kind of credible study on the TOTAL cost of ownership. YA, just train a few admins and we're good to go. No extra costs there. Sure, customers want Microsoft, and we'll give it to them if they want to pay extra. We don

Say, did you graduate high school? Your reading skills seem to be lacking, it's right there in paragraph 3 of the article. Oh wait! I get it you didn't RTFA and decided to spout of anyway. Oh and the mods, good job there.

Windows gives you ACLs, Linux gives you standard unix permissions *AND* ACLs...ACLs are complex, to the point that many windows admins dont bother with them. Unix permissions are simple enough to master but lack some of the flexibility. However, for most purposes permissions are more than adequate, and you also have ACLs if you need more.

But wtf is this about network security? Linux has iptables by default, ssh for communications between machines, NFSv4 for file sharing...Compare that to windows file sharing, which is vulnerable to reflection attacks (see metasploit) and will automatically send your authentication details when you connect to a remove server!Not to mention all the stuff windows has open by default (rpc, netbios, netbios-ns, and more), and which is difficult to turn off. Linux boxes, unless horribly misconfigured, will only listen on the services which are required, with unnecessary services turned off rather than kludgily filtered.

Filelevel security? Referring to file-permissions and such? Well then, just go with ACL's and you have the same functionality on a gnu/linux system, or any other *nix OS.File-sharing... NFSv4 is starting to get very good now but maybe not there yet, so go with NFS and automounter, if you want a bit more security just add a ipsec-tunnel and let you NFS traffic flow... You could probably also add some additional security to this by having the clients use keys stored in the LDAP and received when the user logs

"Puckette says it takes some extra time to get an open source infrastructure configured the right way. "The challenge as opposed to buying solutions from one vendor is that when you buy from Microsoft, you can assume it works with other Microsoft products. With open source you have to take more time to make sure all the products interact and all the pieces fit together. But the cost benefits clearly outweigh going with all Microsoft."

I don't see how OSS can take over Microsoft or Microsoft take over OSS.

Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.

Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.

When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon [cnn.com], but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.

To make up the difference, M$ would have to give them the software, pay the electric bill and donate engineering time for custom applications. If you read the article, you will see that the company dropped from at least 60 servers to 15. I say at least, because the only count they give of how much hardware they were using is the 50 or 60 that "were giving them trouble." It's clear that time spent nursing that mess was better spent moving to software that works better and allows easier customization. Their continued good results with other software proves their competence as well as the poor quality of what they were using before. Quality that poor is a bad deal unless it's heavily subsidized, so your imagined extortion can only work for a few prominent customers. When that does work, the rest of the customers will pay that much more to keep M$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.

Really. Think about the mathematics of that situation. Think about the relationships between the machines, work out the complexity. As far as I can see there are a lot of CEOs and CIOs out there who simply can't multiply two numbers together. And if they can't do that...

Sorry for heavy offtopic, but WTF is this crap again?! I'm not sure I like someone using two accounts to post on/. (if it's proven, the other side is heard, etc.), but constant personal attacks/trolling like these are plain *stupid* and annoying.

this is from an it standpoint, be a small business owner who needs a legit copy of auto cad , ms office, and photoshop
software costs are the bulk of startup costs
yes i know this is why they get there copy's illegally
and yes if they choose open source they will have a hard time delivering to clients ( YES THEY WILL )

I was going to write a witty reply to this post. But I couldn't figure out what the hell "thebear05" was saying. So I'll settle for this: Learn to use grammar and spelling properly, child. An inability to use correct grammar and to spell right is a mark of an underdeveloped mind. So you're either 12, or a person of towering stupidity. (That's XOR for the boolean logic folks)

Don't forget the hardware cost involved. If you pick an OS that requires twice the amount of servers, then your hardware costs - and other related maintenance costs, like technicians, electricity, etc. - go up very significantly.

In addition more hardware can mean more potential security breaches, and so forth.

CEO Rick Puckette is enthusiastic about the change. "When we were using Microsoft, we had a lot more than 15 servers," he says. "We had upwards of 50 or 60 that were becoming difficult to manage. So as part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server, to consolidate." Puckette says that Mindbridge evaluated other virtual machine software, including VMware, but Xen was "very cost-efficient and pretty bulletpro

Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...

I don't know what business they are in (Safari crashes on TFA), but then: I have a very real company, two of them even, and I have only one server. It's doing what I need. But then I'm not in the business of selling web access, or server space, or so. Most companies have only one or two servers, because most companies are not in the business of selling server space. Besides, modern servers can handle a huge lot of work, one server now can easily handle what 10 servers did a decade or so ago.

Depends on what they do. In a windows environment that's nothing because each windows server application seems to demand it's own server - note that the article states the 15 or so mixed is down from 60 pure windows. Assuming no other software aside from windows server (not advanced server or anything) that's around $48k saved right there - before extra software. The big buzzword of the day is consolidation. Instead of having a billion servers and trying to manage security and updates on them all, keep

This story has no credibility with me. The article is ridiculously light on details and seems to be an attempt at self-serving cross-promotion. There is no discussion of how they saved money or what those servers are actually doing. They talk about how much is costs them to "support" a Microsoft box, but they're such a small company, it's hard to imagine what their "support" even consists of.

They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.

Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and supporting both Linux and Microsoft servers. I have found that both work well for the vast majority of applications. I've found other people's Linux servers to be easier to support than other people's Microsoft servers, but this might just be because the average Linux server contact is more knowledgeable than the average Microsoft server contact.

One huge difference is that it is *much* easier to figure out what a Linux server is doing and to start analyzing why it's not doing what it's supposed to do.

They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.

No, they aren't a Linux company. They don't sell Linux and their own products are not Linux-specific. The article says that they started out as a Microsoft shop but switched most of their servers to Linux after observing their customers' good experience with Linux.

The quotes are so extensive that unless the article is making them up it is clear that the article reflects the point of view of Mindbridge, not merely Linux.com's spin. In any case, if the OP had meant to refer to the article, he ought to have written "Linux.com" or "the publication". The obvious referent of "the company" is Mindbridge, the company discussed in the article.

*Absolutely* true. While that obviously justifies pointing out when Microsoft's case studies are erroneous, self-serving, or both, it doesn't justify other people using the same tactics.Not that I'm saying this article is as bad as most of those articles. It's not. No specifics is a lot better than completely false and misleading specifics pulled out of your corporate ass or intentionally deceptive test methodologies you pick but then get a "neutral third-party" to perform so they will "fairly and without b

"The article is ridiculously light on details and seems to be an attempt at self-serving cross-promotion. There is no discussion of how they saved money or what those servers are actually doing"

'part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server [linux.com], to consolidate.. We also use Hyperic to monitor the health and happiness of the servers'

"Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and su

"Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software.

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Then later in the introductory piece...

We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux -- although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"

Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?

I am unable to make any sense of your comment. You asked whether the words are contradictory. I agreed that they are. I then went on to point out that it makes no real difference to the point of the article. No, you didn't use the word "invalidate", but your title does say that the article is "misleading", which amounts to the same thing in this context. Use whatever words you like, but the fact remains that his description of his experience does not depend on whether the conversion was complete or almost

Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?

Not necessarily. The article said their infrastructure was revamped to run completely on open source software, and later that there are two production Windows servers in the shop. Considering part of their business is hosting, and (as they stated), some of their customers wish them to host Windows software, it's possible that these two Windows servers are part of the service they provide and not part of their infrastructure.

That being said, it's probably a domain controller and an Exchange server.

That being said, it's probably a domain controller and an Exchange server.

I would guess you are 100% corrrect about that. But aren't DCs and email servers a very central part of the infrastructure? If those 2 things are still Windows boxes then I'd say there are 2 large and very critical aspects of their infrastructure that rely on Windows servers.

I would guess you are 100% corrrect about that. But aren't DCs and email servers a very central part of the infrastructure? If those 2 things are still Windows boxes then I'd say there are 2 large and very critical aspects of their infrastructure that rely on Windows servers.

That was my point, though I wasn't very clear. After demonstrating that the facts in the article are not necessarily contradictory, I concluded that they probably are.

when you buy from Microsoft, you can assume it works with other Microsoft products.

Assume?! MS is known for all sorts of lock in. Of course their products work with each other! But only the most recent versions, that too is key to MS's overall strategy. It's when you don't want to upgrade or they don't have some need covered that you're out of luck. 3rd party stuff that works with MS is always chancy. Never know when MS might make an internal change and break half the 3rd party stuff as well as old MS stuff.

.. had only ever administered Microsoft boxes in the past, and had to get used to the idea of command lines.

Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!

...looked specifically for new hires who were eager to learn. "The people I like are pretty inquisitive type people. I tried to filter out the others in the interview process."

Sounds like the way we wish hiring decisions were made. Sounds too good to be true.

Well, it's not like you can't run an "Enterprise Business" on 15 servers. I am CTO of a software company servicing school districts in California. We have 70 school districts, hundreds of users and tens of thousands of students in our databases, we make it work with a surprisingly small cluster of 4 4-way Opteron servers, running at just under 5% of capacity. (mid-day load average)

Company fires IT director, hires new IT director who fires all the worthless IT staff who were responsible for 50-60 (insert OS here) servers that were poorly managed -- hires new IT people (fewer of them) that are competent and set up 15 servers running (insert OS here).

I've see that story dozens of times with the (insert OS here) being Linux or Windows.

To anyone who knows Linux (or BSD, or any Unix) it's a no-brainer to run the fast, open, free, fully-configurable stuff.

It's only a legitimately difficult decision to make when a company doesn't have Unix expertise. (Which is often.) Pay the cost to replace your IT staff, or pay the cost to rent software from Microsoft?

I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.

These "I switched to Linux and I saved money articles" are old and meaningless.

"I switched my career from real-estate to oncology and now I make more money!" Great, but what's the real-world cost of doing so, if it's not already a simple option?

(I'm a multi-platform guy with a hybrid environment at home, so save your breath if you're going to point the Finger of Anti-Linux SentimEnt at me.)

But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements?

In terms of personnel it's not always fair to compare admins dollar for dollar. If I've got an admin who can run a Linux environment that performs reliably with a minimum of downtime, that person is worth more to me. They are saving me thousands in licensing costs and thousands more in potential headaches. They're saving me from vendor lock-in, which might be worth a lot somewhere down the road. With Linux I can scale at will instead of the headache of trying navigate Microsoft's byzantine license fees and restrictions. How much is that worth?

It's worth a lot of money to me to keep Microsoft out the mix, not all companies see it that way. Like with any commodity, value is a perception based on a point of view.

Then there are the intangibles. A vendor calls with some zippy-dippy piece of software that's going to make my life so much easier. It's so funny to ask, "Does it run on Linux? Because that's all we use here." Used to be that was inevitably followed by a long pause, not as much lately. More companies are answering that they do support Linux. Which has kind of taken some of the fun out of sales calls. "You don't have any Windows servers?"

I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.

Problem is "point and click" admins are usually completely incapable to troubleshoot anything. Do you want them to keep reinstalling drivers when the problem is flaky ethernet cable ?

I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.

While a competant Unix admin will tend to be more expensive than a Windows admin, you'll need less of them to get the job done. While Unix requires more knowledge to reach entry level

No, the biggest challenge would have been sysadmins capable of doing basic math.
Now lets see... from 60+ servers to 15 (*), reduction of at least 75%.
((*)15 PHYSICAL servers, plus a few VIRTUAL ones thanks to Xen. Still a significant reduction)
Even if you keep the same admin/server ratio that's a change of admin staff of..... let me do the math.....

To aid the process, Christian looked specifically for new hires who were eager

Yes, the issue is not so simple. It really depends upon the company, its situation in the market, and the like. But, generally speaking there is significant cost savings in using some things as open source. In the case of a small contract call center in my area, open source was the saving grace for the company. Their IT overhead was so great that the company felt it could not longer be competitive and was considering closing doors. Indeed, the IT department shrank to three people. But these three intrepid people replaced the proprietary Nortel Telephone system that was bleeding them dry on maintenance, support, and just plain babysitting with two Asterisk servers and SNOM telephones. The second largest expense was on the maintenance of their exchange server. So, exchange was phased out in favor of Zimbra. Zimbra was brought online in a week's time and has seen 99.999% uptime with only looking at the logs once a week versus babysitting an exchange server every day. This is not some case study, this is my friend that achieved remarkable results. Asterisk and Zimbra have put this call center back in the black. My friend does see some merits to proprietary, i.e. Active Directory. Simply put, he needs it to adaquetaly manage his workstations. He thinks once Samba4 [samba.org] hits a release, there is potential for phasing out the windows domain controllers. Soon, Windows will be relegated to a SQL server. My friend says that programmers are working furiously to convert to an *AMP solution.

Having converted most of our servers to Linux from Novell/Microsoft, I can say with confidence that there are savings beyond just hardware, power, Microsoft software and server support hours. The real expense lies in the mindset between the two system architectures. In an open source environment, the goal is to do everything with free software. In a Microsoft environment, the propensity is to buy everything including all the maintenance agreements. _There's_ the killer cost: upgrade and maintenance agreements hold companies hostage to complicated licensing schemes. It's really highway robbery which can sink an IT dept. We have about 140 Microsoft desktops and 25 servers (17 Linux) across 4 offices. By far and away the cost of desktop swamps server by a _huge_ margin. It's pretty sad when a loaded laptop costs more than the server that supports it.

It's not news to anybody that's competent that Linux can save you money. In my industry (web hosting) I'd say 90% of servers are Linux systems. We do have some Windows servers but that's only because customers ask for them and MS literally bribes us to sell them (free licensing, training, cash, etc.)In the long run Linux servers are much, much cheaper. We have servers that have been running for over 440 days without an issue and these are Redhat 7.3 servers. No viruses, no worms, no break-ins, nothing.

Enough TCO slashvertisements for companies we've never heard of, please. Ooh, "corporate data monitoring" from a company whose webserver has a three second round trip. I bet we're all kicking to find out what their monthly OS costs were.

Here's the setup, Installing a Win 2k Server on our intranet for our Windows clients and Freelancers [inwards looking only]. I briefly jumped on the WWW for updates [yes, I know it's not actively supported] having already updated to SP4 manually along with the latest rollup - yada, yada.

OK, now I've been schooled by some of the best on this particular server - in Seattle, mind you, so I got a pretty good handle on this, but hey, I'm no Mark Russinovich.

So, on this "other OS" I was able to quite easily find all things "Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server", home page, oodles of info.Jump on the 2000 Server and off to the download section of MS, [Windows Update and Microsoft Update don't work without IE 6] 20 mins of clicky-clicky and I'm getting nowhere. Weirdly, the word "server" is absent where I'd done the same search earlier on that "other OS".

Next, IE 6.1 SP1.The stub doesn't work, [as usual] so I try the Run trick for the full update, ("C\Download\iesetup.exe/"c: ie6wzrd.exe - something like that).Broke.[not to mention the frequent STOP errors, disk controller errors, etc. on known good hardware]

"August 29, 2007: The development of the Autopatcher project was officially ceased today, when the Microsoft Legal department contacted the Autopatcher team demanding them to put an immediate stop to any further releases. For more details, please read this article."

Like Sony - I'm banning Microsoft, Windows and all things Redmond from our office. I've wasted my time before [and we formally quite supporting Windows here], but this is the last time I do this - it's ALL going, lock, stock and barrel, down to the books and the media it resides on, OUT.

I don't have these problems on the "other" servers - period {.}.

I'm ripping this install out and installing Linux or Solaris, fuck it, at least if I have trouble I haven't got people trying to hide the software I need to get the GOD DAMNED thing running.

No, you'll really hear the chairs moving and flinching when Linux gets to the point that it is so easy to operate that my IT-retarded mom can use it with the same ease that she is used to on her XP (forgetting the problems that I come over to her house to fix), and the video drivers work better across the board (*COatiUGH*, *COnvidiaUGH*). However, I must say the last fedora I saw was a good step in that direction...

Cue Linux Missionaries starting to mod me down as a troll in 3..2..1..

'However, I must say the last fedora I saw was a good step in that direction...'You need to see Ubuntu, using fedora is akin to jamming icicles in your eyes using only a toothpick for grip in comparison. As for video drivers, nvidia are easy enough, in ubuntu it takes two clicks to install the commercial drivers. ATI drivers still suck but yesterday or the day before there was an announcement that AMD is going to completely open the specs on the ATI drivers that means there will be fully optimized and funct

I couldn't agree more.When I walk home every day (I can't afford a car, or public transportation) the public showerme with rose petals, accolades and proclamations of my uber froobiness. Why?Because by God, Microsoft, Church and Apple Pie I built my PC with Windows Ultimate Edition!

Sure it cost a little more and there was that dark spell where I just ate Ramen noodlesMondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and sucked on the salt packets Tuesdays and Thursdaysbut dang it I needed the best, the very best OS in the